Florence Kelley illuminated how degraded environments stemmed from the social relations and operations of industrial capitalism. As a social reformer, she worked to document the various dangers that workers confronted. She presented how laborers were exposed to noxious gases, toxic substances, and poisonous chemicals and dyes. Dangerous materials, such as arsenic, were introduced into the […]
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Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: Beyond the Podolinsky Myth
Until recently, most commentators, including ecological Marxists, have assumed that Marx’s historical materialism was only marginally ecologically sensitive at best, or even that it was explicitly anti-ecological. However, research over the last decade has demonstrated not only that Marx deemed ecological materialism essential to the critique of political economy and to investigations into socialism, but […]
The Great Financial Crisis
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2005 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The Great Financial Crisis began in the summer of 2007 and three years later, despite a putative “recovery,” it is still having profound effects in the United States, Europe, and in much of the world. Austerity is being forced on working people in many countries. Matters are especially difficult in Greece, a country that is […]
The Treadmill of Production: Extension, Refinement and Critique
By John Bellamy Foster on March 1, 2005 in Articles, Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints
Philosopher of science Imre Lakatos (1978) argued that the key to evaluating merit in the sciences lies in the distinction between progressive and degenerative research programs. A research program is progressive if its theoretical growth anticipates its empirical growth (i.e., if it predicts novel facts with some frequency rather than merely explaining facts discovered by […]
Empire of Barbarism
By John Bellamy Foster on December 1, 2004 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
“A new age of barbarism is upon us.” These were the opening words of an editorial in the September 20, 2004, issue of Business Week clearly designed to stoke the flames of anti-terrorist hysteria. Pointing to the murder of schoolchildren in Russia, women and children killed on buses in Israel, the beheading of American, Turkish, […]
Political Economy and the Environmental Crisis: Introduction to Special Issue
By John Bellamy Foster on September 1, 2004 in Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints, Contributions, Introductions
According to Frederick Buell (2003) in his book ‘From Apocalypse to Way of Life’, perceptions of environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s were both narrower in scope and more apocalyptic (usually Malthusian) in tone than those of today. Rather than diminishing, the problem of the environment has only expanded in the years since Rachel […]
The American Empire
By John Bellamy Foster on September 1, 2004 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
On June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a commencement address at American University in Washington, D.C., in which he declared that the peace that the United States sought was “not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” His remarks were a response to criticisms of the United States […]
Ecological Economics and Classical Marxism
This introduction to “Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces” reassesses Sergei Podolinsky’s place in the history of ecological economics together with Marx and Engels’s reaction to Podolinsky’s work. The authors show that contrary to conventional wisdom, Podolinsky did not establish a plausible thermodynamic basis for the labor theory of value that could have been […]
Ecological Imperialism
“Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” (coauthored with Brett Clark), In Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, ed., The Socialist Register, 2004 (London: Merlin Press, 2004), pp. 230-46. Translations: Catalan translation in Corrent Roig, June 6, 2010, http://www.correntroig.org. Spanish translation in El Nuevo Desafío Imperial: Socialist Register 2004 (Clasco, February 2005). Portugese translation in O Novo Desafio […]
Land, the Color Line and the Quest of the Silver Fleece: An Introduction to W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk and The Quest of the Silver Fleece
By John Bellamy Foster on December 1, 2003 in Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints, Contributions, Introductions
Manning Marable (1999) writes that William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) “was without question the most influential black intellectual in American history” (p. v). Even more, he was a citizen of the world, gaining an international stature rarely achieved (Gates, 1989, p. xii). This year is the centennial of The Souls of Black Folk (Du […]
